Einstein was boring before he was brilliant - <AUTHOR> http://calnewport.com/blog/2015/08/05/einstein-was-boring-before-he-was-brilliant/ <comment><USER2> _Einstein was a rebellious student, but he always received exceptional marks in math and physics in school and on entrance exams._

Based on what I've read (mainly the Isaacson biography) I don't think this is true. He may have done well in secondary school but he graduated second to last in his undergraduate physics program. This was from what was at the time a second rate school in a country of less than 8 million people (it later became very prestigious because of Einstein). I doubt someone with a comparable record could get into a PhD program in the US today.

 _The key detail often missed in this story is that while Einstein was a patent clerk, he was continuing to work toward his doctoral degree. He had an adviser, he was reading and writing, he met regularly with a study group (pictured above)._

...

 _In reality, innovation almost always requires long periods of quite traditional training.

Einstein was brilliant and original, but until he finished a full graduate education, he didn't know enough physics to advance it._

He may have had a thesis adviser but I don't know what finishing "a full graduate education" means here. I doubt he would have had any course work requirements and he didn't get his PhD until 1905, the year he revolutionized all of physics.

He received his PhD on March 30 for a thesis on calculating Avogadro's number. His paper on the photoelectric effect which launched quantum mechanics and for which he was later awarded the Nobel prize was received on March 18 and published on July 9.

His paper on Brownian motion, which convinced people that atoms were real, was received May 11 and published on July 18.

The dates for his two papers on special relativity were June 30/September 26 and September 27/November 21.</comment>


Show HN: KQ – Simple Job Queue for Python Using Kafka - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joowani/kq <comment><USER2> One of the biggest problems with treating Kafka as a job queue is that you suffer from head-of-line blocking. Kafka doesn't expose per-message visibility/acknowledgement semantics like RabbitMQ/Redis PUSH+POP/SQS does. Each consumer group tracks offsets into the partitions of a log (aka a topic). This offset is just a number that points to a specific message in the Kafka partition. If you get stuck on message 123, you either can't proceed to 124, proceed and don't commit your offset but risk replaying 124, or skip 123.

A great many of our services publish to Kafka, those consuming services which seek to treat individual records as tasks (or bundles of tasks) as opposed to a linear log must either skip failures or push them onto SQS for background retry. Our batching consumers have to track out-of-order completion of work and commit up to the lowest completed offset, meaning a slow task can delay offset commits. If a consumer is stopped before finishing that slow task, we have to replay work which means all work has to be idempotent. In practice, it works well enough, but it's still some gymnastics.

I suspect this is why Google invested so much into making PubSub scalable despite per-message semantics. It's considerably simpler in many ways, even if you have to bake in your own ordering/monotonicly increasing identifiers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very true. I indeed found the lack of visibility into per-message information very painful when I was building this. One way I tried to alleviate the issue was providing a consumer "callback" to make it easier for users to plug their own code in to handle job failures (like your example of using SQS).

I've also thought about reserving a topic + consumer group specifically for failed jobs and bake the retry logic into KQ itself. But that's an area I must explore more.

I'm not sure if I understand what you are saying about batching consumers. What do you mean by batching in this context? Thanks for your input.

<comment><USER2> We have some consumers which treat log entries as tasks, and often it's handy to debounce some of the work into larger chunks that can be executed in parallel. The chunks can be linear or they could be grouped by some property of the message (e.g. account id). In that case, we have batches of messages with multiple non-consecutive offsets, e.x. [123, 145, 155], [122, 124, 144]. In practice, that means inserting each message offset into a per-partition sorted set of pending work. When a batch completes, all the offsets in that batch are marked as "complete" and we commit the lowest safe offset. Using the example above, if the batch [122, 124, 144] completed, we'd still have [123, 145, 155] outstanding which means the lowest safe offset is 122* even though 124 and 144 also completed in batch 1. Until that second batch completes, 123 is still outstanding making it the barrier to commiting a higher offset.

Our batching consumers provide pluggable behavior for handling a failing batch, but usually it's pushed onto SQS since those can cycle around a few times until we notice and fix whatever condition is preventing progress on that work.

* - 123 actually, as if you commit offset 123 the consumer will fetch offset 123 again on start, but that's implementation esoterica

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone have any opinions on the long-term viability of Kafka? I've been lurking on the kafka dev mailing lists and I'm fairly turned off by the attitude from Confluent's employees that I've read from. There was a recent thread about their open source status and how they backhand Apache's open source philosophies, I'm wondering if they are thinking of moving away from open source in the future.

<comment><USER4> I am not associated with the Kafka dev team or Confluent in any way but have been using Kafka since their 0.7.x days. Speaking of their open source commitment so far, I haven't seen any kind of problems in the way they deal with the community. They have been open to bug fixes, feature enhancements and other contributions.

Many of the Confluent employees you see currently, started off by contributing to the open source code and still do, from what I can see.

>> There was a recent thread about their open source status

I am not sure which thread you are talking about, but if it is that thread which involved adding REST server within Kafka core then I completely back what many of the Confluent employees and other community members decided on that topic. From what I could see in that thread, the whole reason of "we should bring in REST server within Kafka core" was not related to technical reasons but hypothetical reasons like "there's a project out there which already supports this REST feature but what if they don't like my contributions and don't allow me to push features that I like into that repo". That proposal of bringing in the REST server within Kafka core was, IMO, rightly rejected but at the same time, the users were allowed to state the technical reasons why they want that feature within core.

Given any production usable project that has a large user base, discussions and decisions like these are common and that doesn't essentially mean they are moving away from open source. Overall, I have high respect to many of the members of Kafka dev team, many of whom are currently employed at Confluent, for the way they have so far dealt with suggestions to enhancements in the project.

Of course, Confluent builds on top of Kafka and has/will have they own commercial interests, so some of the features that they develop might/will be commercial.

<comment><USER3> Yes, I think that's the one but my biggest takeaway from what I remember was "Apache is okay but..." I remember reading about half a dozen Confluent employees towing the party line and parroting the exact same argument, about how being under Apache was stifling their innovation. And yet Kafka is thriving under Apache, so their arguments smelled fishy as hell.

It sounds like they are setting up the foundation to pull something like what Oracle did with MySQL, and try to take control after countless outside helpers turned the product into something rock solid.

<comment><USER5> There are plenty of outside helpers, but the heavyweights doing the overwhelming majority of the work are either Jay, Jun, or Neha and/or work for one of those 3... All at Confluent. I've met both Jay and Jun in person, and watched Neha present @ MesosCon last year. If they're doing something with tech, it is going to be good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > It is backed by Apache Kafka and designed primarily for ease of use.

That's a bold claim.

<comment><USER7> He means the software requires Kafka as a dependency, not that the foundation is sponsoring it. The claim of "designed primarily for ease of use" is a personal one, not hard to make.

<comment><USER8> I read the comment as "simple and ease of use are not terms often associated with Kafka".

<comment><USER6> You would be correct :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Don't you need zookeeper to use Kafka? Perhaps you should mention that in your dependencies.

</comment><comment><USER10> To me, Kafka as a job queue is a painful impedance mismatch. To achieve that, you need to:

1\. Figure out which Kafka broker you're using. The concept of a consumer and consumer APIs 0.7 is different from 0.8 which is different from 0.9 and different still from 0.10. Ranging from non-existing, to quirky, to finally a good design that's working - but you need to make sure offsets are committed in time.

2\. Offset management is a thing. If you're lucky and using recent brokers you're good, but you'll still have to make sure timings for submitting offsets and heartbeats interleave in a way that Kafka doesn't think consumers are dead. If you had problems imagining this scenario - exactly. This was a very hard race condition to find, that's solely up to you and your motivation to fix it and not scratch it of in favor of "a random glitch".

3\. Kafka clients are still radically different, supporting different versions. You need to be lucky to use a language and a platform that is in harmony with latest consumer APIs. However - I'm certain it'll converge. The ecosystem will converge slower.

4\. Out of reasons Xorlev mentioned, you will find yourself against the wall, making sure each job task is idempotent. Suddenly - this becomes a people management problem too.

All of these can (and probably _will_) be solved, however I feel that (2) and (4) will always be there, because that's part of why Kafka is so great.

In addition, I think Kafka is one product which you _must_ read the "whitepaper"[0] for before you want to build consumers for it. The first reason - because it's an innovative design, that might come in handy in every day life if you're an engineer, and the second reason - is to understand the founding context in which it was created - logs and why there are so many tradeoffs that were done for it to be amazing at that, and to realize that this original founding context was _not_ transactional jobs.

Switching gears now. Many organizations find Kafka as a much needed cure for data processing pipelines, and pushing events and messaging as a first class citizen in the organization from a _data_ point of view. For that, Kafka is amazing. With it, you can realize the dream of having an "event mart" where groups, teams, consume and publish their view of the world, processed, as a message stream, and someone can pick up that stream and build a completely different product on top of it (not a perfect example but one we can all relate to - think about Twitter's firehose).

The perception problem is, that once this floods the organization, there's little to do, to use the same mindset to build _operational_ and transactional queue systems, where you don't process events or data, but perform tasks. Unfortunately that's not true. I'd be happy if there were stronger education about this from Kafka's side.

For the kq project - I wish best of luck and I'd be interested to see it unfold. Code is very clean and I feel it's inviting to just read and learn from it - kudos!

[0] [http://www.longyu23.com/doc/Kafka.pdf](http://www.longyu23.com/doc/Kafka.pdf)

<comment><USER11> Thank you for the excellent feedback and insight. I will definitely give the pdf a read. I agree with all of your points, which admittedly I was not fully aware of when I first embarked on this project. As you've already implied, there are some nuances that may forever be inevitable due to the inherent design of Kafka. But I wouldn't want to dismiss it as unsuitable for job queues so early. It would depend strongly on the use case of course (e.g. jobs that are idempotent or without hard requirement to be processed), but as I am hoping that Kafka's API matures further with finer control over messages and that this could work fairly well for the most part. For now I will take note and update the documentation to clearly explain what KQ is (and what it is not), and what the best practises and use cases must be taken into account before using it. Thanks again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Why should I use this over the simplier RQ?

<comment><USER11> RQ is certainly useful (with finer control over messages), but we've been having a lot of problems with it lately in production due to it being memory bound (Redis). Improper code deploys or insufficient/stuck workers would quickly explode the queues and make the broker go oom in matter of hours. Memory is also very expensive. With KQ/Kafka I was hoping it would provide us with a lot more to buffer for human errors and scale better.

<comment><USER12> Ok, that makes sense. I've never dealt with the scale you are talking about so have yet to run into these issues with redis. It may be best to put this info in the readme so people can decide for themselves when to use RQ or KQ.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What kind of jobs do people put into such queues? Because I've only seen job queues used as a poor man's RPC brokers and (poor?) replacement for crontab. I think I may miss some use cases where this is a valid choice.

<comment><USER14> If you don't like it don't use it. I read through your profile's comments, all you do is complain and bash other peoples ideas.

<comment><USER13> > If you don't like it don't use it.

For our web application, we're already in the middle of transition from Celery to a proper RPC system, so your comment (aimed to, I don't know, make me ashamed? make me shut up and go doing some real work?) somewhat missed.

Though I really want to know if there are any sensible uses for task queue, specifically with web applications in mind, as most people seem to use task queues for that.

> [...] all you do is complain and bash other peoples ideas.

Only the stupid or incomplete ones, like somebody boasting about their system without describing what does it do or how to install and use it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Typo: lightweight in the README should not be hyphenated :-)

</comment><comment><USER16> Pretty clean code. Nice job.

</comment><comment><USER17> Getting a Permission Denied page for the docs at [http://kq.readthedocs.io/en/master/](http://kq.readthedocs.io/en/master/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fixed!</comment></comment>


Making Digital Mosaic Photos in Golang - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rabarar/dylan <comment><AUTHOR> Here's a solution to COVID-19 boredom - I wrote a quick and dirty tool to build Mosaic Photos from a bucket of other photos as color palette. Give it a try! Beats the news.</comment>


Why Apple Pay is poised to succeed where others failed - <AUTHOR> http://www.tuaw.com/2014/10/09/why-apple-pay-is-poised-to-succeed-where-others-failed/

<comment><USER2> Tell me something I didn't already know ;)</comment>


Should Bogus Copyright Takedown Senders Be Punished? - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/should-bogus-copyright-takedown-senders-be-punished-120909/

<comment><USER2> A small amount (and I mean _small_ as in anyone can afford it, something like $5 or $10) should be required in escrow to make the report. If the report was valid, there is no contest and the content is taken down, your money is returned.

If the takedown _is_ challenged, and turns out to be false, the money is split between the hosting service _and the poster of the content you tried to have removed_.

People will try to game the automatic detectors to get false positives (and some $ for themselves) but for some time, this will be a feature, not a bug. They'll get real accurate, real fast, even if it means human review of every takedown.

<comment><USER3> I think that's too small. I'd rather see something like

DEPOSIT = MIN(MAX($20, 0.1 * RevenueLossDuringTakedownProcess), $100)

A small content provider a) is able to never make a bogus claim since he will not do it automatically and b) should be able to bet $100 on it.

<comment><USER4> Except, it's not going to be $100, it's going to be $2000, because the hosting provider has an incentive to report as high a RevenueLossDuringTakedownProcess as they can get away with. A lot of small artists are not going to be able to lock up $2000 at several sites.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Filing a false DMCA takedown is already a crime. It's perjury.

<comment><USER6> Then the question can be rephrased, for the US anyway, as "Should that part of the DMCA be enforced?"

<comment><USER7> That part of the DMCA, sadly, doesn't exist. The only penalties it gives are for the infringement and for the failure to take content down when given a valid request.

There's nothing for false claims. In fact, I don't think there are any provisions for punishing fraudulent Copyright claims.

<comment><USER8> Wrong. See 17 USC § 512(f):

(f) Misrepresentations.— Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section—

(1) that material or activity is infringing, or

(2) that material or activity was removed or disabled by mistake or misidentification,

shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys' fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner's authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it. [1]

1\. <http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Something to add into the discussion here are anti piracy agencies. The ones that advertise themselves as 'we can insert bad packets into torrents so that pirating your content takes longer or becomes impossible'. Many of these outfits will issue bogus takedown notices and then use that as proof to gain clients.

An example, Agency A sends a request to TPB to remove the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers album. They don't represent universal but if TBP removes the torrent then they go running to Universal and score a contract to 'safeguard' their content online and make sure infringing websites get notices. The first few notices they send out are almost always bogus. Perjury, but this is now an actual business!

</comment><comment><USER4> If the system is to work as designed, it's a hard question. With not-a-lot to discourage people from posting copyrighted works, there will be a lot of media on a lot of safe-harbor sites deserving of a take-down notice. Remove the first 10%, and you've not actually made it appreciably harder for those interested to find the content - you have to be at least fairly thorough. So, you are stuck filing a bunch of these notices. If you make a mistake just one time in a thousand, legitimate artists operating in good faith will be making a mistake here or there. Jailing them is not optimal. On the other hand, abuse of the system is obviously happening, and should be punished. Telling the difference, in some cases, will be difficult.

<comment><USER10> Artists are rarely the ones who file these notices. Typically the filers are lawyers, who should know better.,

I'd be okay with disbarring them, personally.

<comment><USER4> That actually doesn't matter. You're advocating someone bear the risk of a ruined life over a single mistake, and given the number of takedowns needing to be filed there will be mistakes made. Someone will have to bear the cost of that risk.

Of course, this is all leaving aside larger reforms - I just think that harsher liability is not an obvious band-aid; it has issues too.

<comment><USER10> "That actually doesn't matter."

Why? Aren't lawyers supposed to be professionals who are held responsible for their mistakes?

Filing false notices can ruin lives too.

PEs and doctors lose their licenses and/or have to pay massive malpractice judgments for mistakes all the time. Why not lawyers?

<comment><USER4> Because the analysis is of what it does to the burden placed on artists (or those, really or purportedly, operating on their behalf) in the existing system. If the cost of a mistake is a ruined life, that side of things gets radically more expensive.

All of my analysis here is predicated on "if we want to try to make the existing system work like it is supposed to," which I will be the first to agree is not our only option; even in that restricted scope, my conclusion was "it's tough to say..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> To hell with the suggested three strikes nonsense. I would prefer the more draconian solution: 10k fine for every instance of bogus takedown. Money going to owner of the site in question.

<comment><USER12> Well that's an interesting idea. Now, what happens if a small-time artist that doesn't follow the same distribution philosophy as many other artists these days (for example, if he followed a "I want money for my works" perspective), files what he thinks is a legitimate take down request and turns out to be wrong? 10k fine? He's small time and can't afford that.

The law is not a fine scalpel, it's a blunt instrument; and people supporting law creation need to remember that. This goes on both sides.

<comment><USER13> How can he be wrong? He can't recognize his own music?

The problem are automated systems; the solution is just not to use one.

<comment><USER12> Using a 10 second sequence that happens to be the same across multiple songs. Not knowing the exact details of the law, and thinking that reproductions of the song are also owned by him?

<comment><USER13> Having to listen to the full song (or, alternatively, not going after people who are just distributing ten second excerpts) and having to know the law before beating people with it don't seem unreasonable demands to me.

<comment><USER12> Is 10 seconds of the song considered fair use by big media?

<comment><USER13> I'm pretty sure big media considers fair use an obscene concept, but I don't really see how is that relevant, since I didn't say ten seconds of a song should become fair use.

<comment><USER12> I was extending an assumption based off:

"not going after people who are just distributing ten second excerpts"

<comment><USER13> You are forgetting to account for context.

I was saying that they couldn't go _if they can't afford to lose ten grand if they're wrong about the song_ , not that it'd be illegal to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I recently got a copyright takedown request for a site of mine from a competitor. Of course the request was bogus, but the availability of template copyright takedown emails online makes it very easy for any Joe to request a takedown. Maybe requiring more effort for people to submit takedown requests could help minimize bogus senders.

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the idea in the comments about having a charge placed on each take down notice issued, might do the trick.

<comment><USER16> But why should a valid notice be charged? Isn't it similar to paying to report a theft[1]?

[1] I know I have used the word theft loosely here.

<comment><USER17> It's not theft, though. Copyright infringement is civil, not criminal (correct me if I'm wrong). Filing a suit against someone is a more apt analogy, and nobody gets to file for free unless the lawyer thinks there's a good enough chance at a monetary award.

<comment><USER18> I think technically you are not wrong but actually depending on how angry the media corporations are you can get your assets frozen or be extradited like a criminal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What about Google and other companies' auto-takedown bots? Should they be penalized for getting it wrong?

<comment><USER13> On what grounds would a company be penalized for taking down parts of their own websites? Should YCombinator be penalized if they delete a post?

<comment><USER19> They shouldn't but if you can't have a perfect system then it's best to have a system as close to perfect as possible and that is something we do not have. So ideally an entity wouldn't be punished for requesting a takedown of their own content but because of the insane volume of bogus takedown requests I think it's better to punish those who send them and if anyone accidentally sends a takedown request for themselves then them's the breaks until the system can differentiate between legit, bogus, and self takedown requests.

Furthermore, I'm not sure how YC deleting a post and issuing a DMCA takedown request against content on their own site are the same thing. This isn't about deleting content at all. Whether a site deletes content isn't at issue whether it violates copyright or not. The issue is sending bogus takedown requests to others.

<comment><USER20> So if gmail's spam filter isn't perfect, it's better to have no spam filter?

<comment><USER19> No, exactly the opposite. I'm saying if you can't have perfect then take the next best thing. In your example the next best thing would be taking an imperfect spam filter over none at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> In a word, "yes". A lot of the 3rd party DMCA mills (i.e.BayTSP, now part of Irdeto, or Attributor before it was bought by Mark Monitor) pretty much get strongarmed by their Big Content paymasters (as much as I find that bad, the combination of some of the others in that field, who have a total lack of scruples and will do whatever is asked as log as a buck is to be made).

The result is often a Vietnam-like fixation on "how many notices did you send this week????" and other such drivel.

THAT in turn drives carelessness with what gets flagged for a notice being sent.

</comment><comment><USER22> Off topic, but almost every link in that article seems to link the wrong part of the sentence. Is it just a linking style I'm not familiar with?

</comment><comment><USER23> Could the punishment be founded on restraint of trade? Does money or other consideration have to change hands for there to be "trade?"

Or would it be the more obvious restriction of free speech. Is anyone but the government required to "do no harm" to free speech?

<comment><USER24> > _Or would it be the more obvious restriction of free speech. Is anyone but > the government required to "do no harm" to free speech?_

Not in America, aside from some very specific exceptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> 17 USC § 512(f) of OCILLA already allows for damages for misrepresentations. If everyone who got a false takedown sued then they would soon stop.

</comment><comment><USER25> Yes. Duh. Now, if wishes were horses...</comment>


A Mothers's Blood Reveals Entire Genome of Child  - <AUTHOR> http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3908/mums-blood-test-reveals-genome-foetus <comment><USER2> > "Foetal DNA makes up about 10% of a pregnant woman's blood plasma." <\- I'd > be quite surprised to learn that DNA makes up 10% of anyone's plasma, so I > think they're saying that 10% of the DNA isolated from plasma is found to be > fetal.

> "The latest research isolated foetal genetic signatures in the floating DNA, > _then compared its characteristics against the genetic maps of the mother > and father_. That way, scientists were able to construct a genome-wide > genetic map of the foetus, which they could then scan for variations and > mutations."

Now I'm interested to read more. The article can be found behind the following paywall: <http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/2/61/61ra91.abstract> .

 _Update_ : OK, I was a bit confused by the DNA extraction process. From what I can tell, they only took DNA from the parents once, at ~12 weeks gestation. They then GWASsed them and found sites where the fetus would be an _obligate heterozygote_ because the mother was homozygous for one allele while the father was homozygous for another. (So if mom is AA and dad is GG, the fetus must be AG, assuming no point mutation occurs there.)

But if the blood is only drawn once, 10% of the maternal DNA will be fetal DNA, so how are they confidently calling sites as homozygous in the mother? I suppose this makes sense if Birdseed is robust to 5% error in the data, and if so this is quite clever. (5% because 10% of the DNA is fetal, and at the obligate het sites half of that 10% will be maternal so only 5% total will be of paternal origin.)

Now, their method is for high-depth whole-genome sequencing, which is still very expensive, but there's no reason they couldn't use targeted sequencing with this approach (they address this in the discussion). That would allow for a potentially inexpensive test for inherited genetic disorders without invading the fetal privileged space (which is what we currently do, and which is high-risk).

<comment><USER3> The hard part is figuring out the maternally inherited foetal DNA, because it's already present in the mother's bloodstream. For features which are present in the mother but not the father, it's fairly easy with the data they have. For vice versa, it's probably not going to be possible for some time.

<comment><USER2> Agreed, mostly, at least from first principles. The enrichment will be very modest. On average for any given chromosome, 45% of DNA in the mother's blood should be maternal DNA from one chromosomal copy or the other. This gets us to 90%.

The remaining 10% is split between one paternal copy and one maternal copy.

This means that--if we ignore other differences such as fragment length-- you're potentially trying to label the chromosomal copy that comprises 50% of DNA as the one inherited by the fetus, versus the one comprising 45% of DNA as the one not inherited by the fetus. That's a very small enrichment.

Now, because of the length differences that they identified, they may be able to vastly enrich for fetal DNA (or precipitate out maternal DNA), obviating this problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> People may also retain full cells from their mothers (or in extreme chimeral cases, 'vanished twins') through their whole life:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/10/health/10bloo.html?_r=1...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/10/health/10bloo.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all)

From the article:

 _Another route to chimerism is through the cells that routinely pass from a mother to fetus and remain there for life.

Dr. Ann Reed, chairwoman of rheumatology research at the Mayo Clinic, who uses sensitive DNA tests to look for chimerism, finds that about 50 to 70 percent of healthy people are chimeras. The more scientists look for chimerism, the more they find it. It seemed not to exist in the past, she said, because no one was explicitly looking for small amounts of foreign cells in people's bodies._

Further, experiments in mice show that stem cells from a fetus can take up residence in the mother's body, possibly indefinitely _and_ granting benefits:

<http://www.vetscite.org/publish/items/002393/index.html>

Taken all together, these results suggests a woman might have persistent chimeric cells from any or all of the following, if including all remote possibilities:

• her own mother

• a 'vanished twin'

• a grandmother or earlier matrilineal ancestor (if those cells persisted in the mother and then also transfered to the fetus)

• older siblings (if those cells persisted in the common mother and then also transferred to the later fetus)

• her own children

• and of course, any donors from which the woman receives blood or tissue during a medical procedure

</comment><comment><USER5> There is a pregnancy condition called PUPPP -- itchy hives. I don't have a reference to the study on hand, but it is known that most women who suffer from PUPPP give birth to boys, and that male DNA is present in the hives. One theory about it goes that male DNA is a skin irritant.

<comment><USER6> You're saying men are an irritant? I'll buy that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bad science journalist draws conclusions not stated in the research reported upon. It's clear to me that scanning for DNA fragments cannot tell you anything about chromosome abnormalities, so I doubt the researchers said any such thing.

Thus, this research is completely useless to anyone who would choose to screen for the most common birth defects (not just sort of useless -- if you are doing CVS or amnio, you have a cleaner source of DNA).

This technique seems only really useful for people who want to screen for specific recessive diseases like tay-sachs or sickle cell, and don't want to do a more invasive test.

<comment><USER2> > It's clear to me that scanning for DNA fragments cannot tell you anything > about chromosome abnormalities, so I doubt the researchers said any such > thing.

It's not at all clear to me; why would you think this?

<comment><USER7> To take trisomy 21 as an example (Down's syndrome cause), this means the fetus has three copies of chromosome 21. After a CVS or amnio, the lab will look at the cells under the microscope and look for two copies of each chromosome. If they find three instead, that's a chromosome abnormality. If you break open the cells and end up with DNA fragments floating around, it's possible to sequence the DNA but there's not any information that can tell you whether a cell had an extra copy of a chromosome. It's like asking whether the apples to make a cup of juice were all packed in the same box or multiple boxes.

Apparently this same researcher _does_ have a down syndrome test, but it is based on measuring RNA ratios and does not seem to rely on sequencing the fetus's DNA at all.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/health/research/07down.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/07/health/research/07down.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2)

So I am now confused as to what is being reported in this story. Is this using DNA or fetal RNA?

<comment><USER2> Glad I asked! I was thinking about chromosomal rearrangements, which would be detectable using this method, but I agree with your point about nondisjunction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> How does DNA get into the bloodstream? It shouldnt be getting out of the nucleus let alone the cell membrane and beyond that there's that whole placenta thing.

This sounds bogus to me.

<comment><USER2> Biology is not quite as clean as you seem to think it is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> By the time a mother has had a few kids, her blood has held all of the DNA in the family.

I found the most striking revelation for me was that _my_ DNA will be floating throughout my wife's body. That seems a bit weird... for her

<comment><USER3>
      _my_ DNA will be floating throughout my wife's body

Strictly speaking, only copies of half of your DNA.

<comment><USER10> Each time is half, but it's not always the same half. I think it's a 50/50 chance each time, so after 2 it's about 75%, 3 is about 88%, etc.

<comment><USER2> I don't think they're claiming that this stuff sticks around in any significant quantity after the fetus is delivered.

<comment><USER10> funthree said _By the time a mother has had a few kids, her blood has held all of the DNA in the family._ and that's mostly true :-)

<comment><USER2> Yes, agreed.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why asking complex low-level algorithms in a Java job interview? - <AUTHOR>

I can't understand why I am asked to resolve some tricky/stupid/unreal algorithm using Java in a job test. I am missing something?? I know that the code has to be as efficient as possible and the pragmatism is cool and so on.
I just think that what Java is looking for is getting away from all of that. And there are a lot of better solutions for this kind of jobs like C, or even R.
I think the nature of the problems to solve in Java are not related with this complex algorithms. I mean, I have been training myself in generics, OOP, SOLID principles, Clean Code, Design Patterns, TDD, BDD and some others for the last three years.
How I am supposed to show my skills in one hour resolving a low level algorithm in a web IDE (this particular case)? All my "low level thinking" is pretty oxidized.
Maybe I am just wrong. A novel speaking. <comment><USER2> Because programmers love to be huge dicks to one another and it is unfortunately widely supported behaviour in the community.

In no other field is it really acceptable to ask a candidate to solve issues that have nothing to do with the job, I liken it to asking your prospective surgeon how they'd fix a leaking faucet, or a plumber how they'd repair a ruptured artery.

However I am most definitely in the minority, most programmers thing it is perfectly fine and normal that you have to study obscure CS curricular whenever you apply for a programming job. Then never ever use that same material again while at that job.

Sorry you had to interview at a dicky company, just do what I do, reject them as somewhere you want to work and move on. It speaks volumes of the atmosphere (e.g. unrealistic expectations, treating people badly, arrogant/pompous employees, etc).

</comment><comment><USER3> It really depends on the company and your role.

If you are entry level, I can see testing you on this since it should be fresh in your mind from school and you probably know nothing anyway.

If you have been coding for 5-6 years doing annotations and configuration heavy java code. Chances are you remember nothing and will need to study up. To me, this is completely useless and if your job doesnt entail doing this, I have no idea why they ask these questions.

I think what would be a far better option would be to ask you a few algorithm questions, give you a packet to study, then invite you back to test again. Because in my mind the biggest indicator of success as a programmer is the ability to learn new things in a short period of time.

I think this is why companies like google still ask these questions (in addition to being a remnant from the times when every developer at google worked intimately with complex data structures) is that they want to see if you can learn it. I don't think anyone there has delusions that anywhere close to 100 percent of their accepted applicants knew this stuff before the interview process, but again I think they want to know if they can learn it quickly

<comment><AUTHOR> Good answer. I need a week for getting all my low-level tools sharpened for this kind of job. But I don't want this kind of job so.. Done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't think it has to do with Java in particular, but rather with testing your algorithmic and problem-solving skills in general

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes I totally understand but I think the nature of the problems to solve in Java are not related with this complex algorithms. I mean, I have been training myself in generics, OOP, SOLID principles, Clean Code, Design Patterns, TDD, BDD and some others for the last three years.

How I am supposed to show my skills in one hour resolving a low level algorithm in a web IDE (this particular case)? All my "low level thinking" is pretty oxidized.

Maybe I am just wrong. A novel speaking.

<comment><USER5> How are you supposed to demonstrate those skills in an hour doing anything? The only practical way to determine high level skills, such as the ones you listed, is through studying past work. The company has probably already formed an opinion on those skills and is testing to see how well rounded your skill set is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I often ask on interviews about binary search and hash tables. These are things which we use very often in libraries, and aren't that complicated.

<comment><AUTHOR> Arrays.binarySearch(...) And for a more in deep knowledge, Google. This is what I expect from a Java programmer.

Hash tables... Hashtable vs HashMap? Classic one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can you give an example of what low-level algorithm you were asked to implement? Otherwise it's hard to say either way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Integer array. Applying the next rule, How many jumps are necessary for getting out of the array? Return -1 if never gets out.

A[K] = M -> jump to -> A[K+M] = L

I don't know If this is enough for understanding the problem.

It's not complex but my solution is going to suck. BTW they like it...

<comment><USER7> I think it is, and I have to disagree with you. I think it is a very interesting puzzle for candidates. The array is basically a tree A[K] and the jump is a pointer to its parent node. If the jump is out of the array, A[K] is a root. Your task appears to be to find the max depth of the graph or return -1 if it contains cycles.

<comment><AUTHOR> A tree?? I can't see any tree.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Supposedly, You can't use the term 'Woo' in a domain name -- Help!!! - <AUTHOR> I just got a cease and desist from a law firm representing Automattic for using the term 'Woo' in my domain name... Not even sure what to do! Help! <comment><USER2> I see... they bought a company called WooCommerce a couple of years ago [0].

I think your choices are (a) find a different domain name or (b) talk to an attorney. You don't say what your site does, but if it's very different from e-commerce, you might be able to successfully fight this [1]. You will need a lawyer, though, and some amount of money.

Good luck!

[0] [https://ma.tt/2015/05/woomattic/](https://ma.tt/2015/05/woomattic/)

[1] [http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-it-trademark- infri...](http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/is-it-trademark-infringement)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the information, it's appreciated. Guess I am going to have to hire a lawyer.

Part of the problem is that we distribute official WooCommerce extensions under the GPL General Public License... It's a legal grey area for sure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You should ask a lawyer and that costs money, unless Automattic did a McMansion and people will help you for free. But nobody will know unless you tell us your domain and what kind of services you provide there.

<comment><AUTHOR> The site in question is; [https://woorefugee.com](https://woorefugee.com)</comment></comment>


Data Visualization with JavaScript - <AUTHOR> http://sathomas.me/jsdataviz/index.html

<comment><USER2> Oops. Although I wasn't really trying to keep this a secret, it's just something that's very much still in-progress. It certainly hasn't been edited yet. To be honest, I'm more worried that the material will fall out-of-date before I can finish it. But comments and criticism (kind or otherwise) are still very much welcome. I really do intend to spend more time on this starting in a month or so. Who knows, it folks are really interested that might be enough of an inspiration to finally push through and finish it.

<comment><USER3> Now you have the HN editing/grammar-nazi army!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's all very nice. But this made me throw up a little. "With a functional programming implementation, it's hard to imagine how a bug (other than a typo) might even be introduced."

</comment><comment><USER5> I actually stumbled on this book yesterday. I read a few chapters. What surprised me the most other than the good content if you're in the JS analytics space, but actually the fluidity and level of the writing was so much than what you usually expect to come across in what on the surface of things should be dry. It kept me going for a few more chapters. Hope this catches on.

</comment><comment><USER6> Good Book indeed. We are learning alternative from here after d3.js and Highchart. Reading the book and will try to employ this in analytic portions of our in-house project.

</comment><comment><USER7> I noticed Raphael being used - is it still the library of choice? I though most focus is on D3 these days? Would you mind sharing your rationale for each library used?

<comment><USER2> For specialized visualizations, of course, there are specialized libraries. For the more general uses I mostly wanted to provide a survey of some of the libraries that are available. It's not really intended as a recommendation of one library over another. When you really look at it, all of the general charting libraries are pretty similar. I did want to stick with true open source, so no HighCharts, for example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've always been a D3.js fan, more so because of the extensive range of novel chart types that it has. But, this looks good when you need a simpler solution.

<comment><USER9> AFAIK D3.js does not have 'a range' of chart types. It's just that you can use D3 to draw anything you like including charts, maps etc. It does not have any chart types built-in.

<comment><USER8> What I meant was users have created an extensive library of re-usable chart types. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bravo and thanks to another new and free reference. The non-technical writing has to be tightened up a bit though...it seems that the author, when addressing unknown domains, goes too far in assuming that "oh, everyone knows [this/that]"

Examples from the intro page:

[http://sathomas.me/jsdataviz/intro.html](http://sathomas.me/jsdataviz/intro.html)

\- _Even the BBC and the New York Times have noticed: Data defines our world._ ...OK, both are certainly old organizations...that doesn't necessarily mean both have been slow on the data uptake...

\- _Yet according to some estimates, 99.5% of the data our systems collect goes to waste. No one ever analyzes it effectively._ \- Uh..."some estimates" links to The Register, which has written a story based off of anecdotes...what's that saying about data not being the plural of anecdote? "99.5%" is such an extreme estimate that it sounds like a parody of "44% of all statistics are made up".

\- _The best visualizations, in fact, impart this understanding subconsciously. Viewers comprehend the data immediately—without thinking. Such presentations free the viewer to more fully consider the implications of the data: the stories it tells, the insights it reveals, or even the warnings it offers._ \-- Huh?

\- _If you're developing web sites or web applications today, there's a good chance you have data to communicate, and that data may be begging for a good visualization. But how do you know what kind of visualization is appropriate?_ \-- These are all good questions and concerns, but none of them have anything to do with JavaScript, as Edward Tufte was able to tackle this topic before JS was invented.

Yeah, I'm being nitpicky...but the field of data visualization already has too much fluff and confusion. Also, when a writer focuses on a reasonable scope, rather than attempt to play anthropologist/psychologist...there's more time to focus on their actual material.</comment>


Show HN: Jsonpad, store JSON data and access it via a REST API - <AUTHOR> https://jsonpad.io

<comment><AUTHOR> This has been a side project of mine for the last couple of weeks.

It's a really simple JSON database: you can create lists and fill those lists with chunks of JSON data, all via a REST API.

In many of my projects, I usually find myself repeating the same pattern - building a database and API that serves JSON - so I figured that a generic JSON storage system would make things easier.

To be honest, I'm not really sure how useful this will be to anyone, but I'd love to hear your feedback. Specifically, are there any features that are missing that would also be 'essential' for this sort of thing?

I've got a few ideas for features that might make it even more useful, for example:

\- multiple API tokens per account, and the ability to set read/write permissions (per list, or even per item) for each token.

\- 'typed lists', where each list has an attached 'JSON schema' which gets checked every time an item is added or modified.

\- sorting/searching, where for each list you can define a set of paths (using JSON Pointer format), each path would represent a field that can be sorted or searched on. I'd need to extract the values and index them separately for sorting/searching to be fast.

Anyway, let me know what you think!</comment>


Octohub – The missing app for GitHub - <AUTHOR> http://octohubapp.com

<comment><USER2> The site lets you download the app, run the app, log in to GitHub, and _THEN_ asks you for a beta invite code. There's almost no info about it on it's homepage, so why post the link at all?

<comment><USER3> Came here to say this. I'm rather annoyed at the bait-and-switch here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is this a fully native app, or is it storing my stuff on your server?

Can I back up tags / whatever that I make, and will they sync between multiple devices?

Is the app open-sourced? Will it be? Are you planning to charge for the app? For premium features?

Most importantly, why are the features you're providing going to improve my experience with GitHub?

These are all questions I'd expect the landing page to answer.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm confused: GitHub already has an app for the Mac[0]. It's fast. It's compact & doesn't waste screen real estate. It's stable. And it's updated very frequently.

Sure, it may not have all the features that the site has but it excels at being that convenience bridge between what's on my filesystem and what's on the site.

[0] [https://mac.github.com](https://mac.github.com)

<comment><USER6> No this seems to be a pointless replacement for the website browsing of repos. Utterly pointless

<comment><USER7> Huh? you can push from your local repo to the remote, and it makes partial commits and other stuff a lot easier

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> And another generic landing page completely missing the point by omitting the "Octohub is a ... which ... for ..."-thing.

<comment><USER9> Macsumption.

So also, if it's not for all platforms (web?) then please, platform should be in the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If pointless-ware is a thing, then this is it. Can anyone comment on the "missing" in the title? Missing by who?

</comment><comment><USER11> This seems like it should be a dead simple chrome/safari extension. Not an app.

The only thing this app appears to do is let you "tag" repositories.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Made for OSX 10.10 Yosemite"

Into the trash it goes...

</comment><comment><USER13> What could this app possibly do that isn't possible on Mavericks?

<comment><USER14> Probably the (nonessential) frosted visual effect in the menu. Other than that, I have no idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> how is this better than github.com?

<comment><USER16> It's not.

<comment><USER17> Have you tried it?

<comment><USER16> No. Because, first, I'm a gnu/linux user nowadays, and second, even if I was a Mac user I would need more than 4 PNGs to convince me to use a software I encounter for the first time.

edit: ...and, as the app for Github is not missing, the third reason for not using the app is that its web page is shamelessly lieing* .

* One may well see this as «lying», but I reject to spell like that.

<comment><USER17> Seems like you lied too, given that you simply don't know if there are any ways in which it is better than the github app.

<comment><USER16> It would be lieing if I told I used it and in respect to Github's own software, that being the website and/or the client application, I found it worse. But in my first comment, which is simply «It's not.», I cannot see any indications of such statement. And I back what I state with my actual comment. On the website there is no link to information about the application, no documentation, no videos, no blog posts, nothing. Instead, I, and the software's target audience, are users of the Github.com already, and we know how to use github.com already, there is a plethora of docs, wikis, blog posts, videos which help us on using it on the web. Plus, the software is a third- party client to a service that already offers an official client. Out of this situation, the most obvious inference is that sticking to the website and/or the official application is better that using the OP's linked one. No lieing here, just reasoning.

If there was any sort of documentation or anything, a link to source on github, an end-user support possibility better than a twitter account that follows popular tech-news websites and tech celebs, I might have thought that it is promising and worth a try. But as it stands, no, it doesn't make me «step into the shop».

<comment><USER17> Nope. You made a statement you knew to be unsupported. Their lack of documentation doesn't change that at all. If you tried the app you would know that you are actually wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't understand why so much hate. If you don't like it or feel the need for such an app no one is forcing you to use it.

<comment><USER19> Because it's essentially a "show HN" of an app that doesn't solve a problem (or at least doesn't explain how it does). HN is a place for healthy debate, no? Nobody said, "sucks" and moved on. In most comments, there's at least a reason stated for why this is either confusing, pointless, or unnecessary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I like the functionality, but I'm not keen on the title of this post or the fact that it's an app only.

If you like the app, though, you might want to check out Astral ([https://astralapp.com](https://astralapp.com)). Extremely similar functionality, but Astral runs in your browser.

</comment><comment><USER21> I signed up for the beta because I always like trying out new stuff. But I'm lost on how this would be better than just opening github.com in my browser.

I guess the main value-add I could see would be notifications when people open issues, send PRs, or fork repos of mine. Does this app display them?

</comment><comment><USER22> Two invite codes (for 2 users): 6B7DEA03-BB85-4392-8B5A-765458941175 4DF904EA- DC05-42EF-B7C5-B10A3E628F31

</comment><comment><USER23> Where can we get beta invite links?</comment>


Mercedes Benz and Matternet unveil vans that launch delivery drones - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/07/mercedes-benz-and-matternet-unveil-vans-that-launch-delivery-drones/ <comment><USER2> Very surprised at their choice of a quadcopter which has four very obvious single points of failure.

A hexacopter, or better still an octo with split flight controllers and power sources has some chance of recovering from a powertrain failure - an essential criteria for a multi-rotor designed to fly in or over populated areas, or indeed anywhere where the cost of the loss of the vehicle or payload is prohibitive.

(None of which of course solves the problem of how you safely land and secure the delivery at the target site, but it's table stakes.)

This is a hobby-drone cleverly positioned to senior execs looking for the new hotness without understanding the fundamental requirements for a practical solution.

</comment><comment><USER3> I believe oneway drones are next so that the van doesn't have to stop moving. Then upgrade to a truck on a highway - just keep launching as the truck is maintaining 55-65 mph. Unit lands in your yard. When you get home, Remove your item, fold up the power unit, recycle the cardboard/plastic components and stick the reusable portion of the unit in your mailbox. Unit is self addressed and postage included to go back to the nearest facility.

<comment><USER4> Doesn't that turn the delivery problem into an exactly mirrored pickup problem? Getting the drones back would be about as much work as getting the package to you.

<comment><USER5> Couldn't you make drones that unpack the package? So there is nothing to return?

<comment><USER4> I believe the idea was, the truck is going too fast to stop and wait for them to return.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How could we design/modify our homes to receive these packages?

Santa Claus-chute for things to slide down?

Helicopter landing pad in the front yard?

How can we sort the packages/letters into their individual receptacles?

This could save US mail carriers a lot of effort.

<comment><USER7> Interesting. Maybe a new type of mail box in the roof for houses (as you suggest), and some kind of Amazon Locker with a landing pad on top for the apartment complexes. Combining drones with a better mail box would allow the asynchronous delivery of packages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> They mention hard-to-reach location delivery. But it may be simply more efficient to deliver in a 'star' geometry with the van stationary and the drones dropping packages throughout a neighborhood. Save time; save on traffic and parking (park under a freeway, deliver to the business district).

</comment><comment><USER8> What a weird combination. I understood Matternet's strategy while using drones for the good of humanity delivering HIV testing in faraway places. Partnering with Mercedes Benz to deliver "things to places" seems like it is competing with Amazon. Does Mercedes have or want a large African footprint? Do non- Amazon stores have enough of a desire to have speedy drone delivery of packages that this makes sense from a business standpoint? Is this news the product of a large MB investment that needs attention and proof of traction?

<comment><AUTHOR> It isn't that weird.

Mercedes and Matternet both have an interest in the efficient, cost-effective delivery of things. Matternet, for now, is concerned with the "last mile," ([https://mttr.net/company](https://mttr.net/company)), the aerial logistics part, and Mercedes is concerned with every other mile.

Amazon is a prospective client, they have the things people want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> They are being too timid in their thinking and designs. All they need is the driverless "engine cab" and then a transformer-like packing of drones to form the rest of the vehicle. It arrives in the neighborhood of delivery and then all the drones take off, deliver, they return, and reassemble into the driverless delivery truck.

<comment><USER10> I blame them for wanting to achieve a working product rather than a really cool concept.

<comment><USER11> That would be a truck with a docked cargo bike.

<comment><USER10> Your cargo bike can fly over walls?

<comment><USER11> It can go around walls. I did not notice the concept to specifically mention prison yard drops.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Cancer Hospital Ads Deceive Patients About Their Chances Of Survival - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/stephaniemlee/cancer-treatment-center-misleading-ads <comment><USER2> Advertising prescription drugs to the general public is forbidden in the EU. Any over-the-counter mood-alternating substances, including sleeping pills must not be advertised, too (speaking of Germany, not sure whether this applies everywhere). In TV ads you mostly see over-the-counter painkillers and meds against digestion problems like flatulences. I have never seen an ad for a clinic either.

Similar rules exist worldwide: [http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/8/09-040809/en/](http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/87/8/09-040809/en/) The US and New Zealand seem to be the only countries allowing this kind of marketing.

I find medicine or health-related ads from the US utterly disturbing. While such laws existed nationally since the beginning of the 20th century, the newer EU laws here were made specifically to prevent a situation like in the US (i.e. thanks for providing the useful bad example, guys).

<comment><USER3> Not sure if it's EU-wide, but it's certainly the case in the UK too.

Here, we predominantly see adverts for: basic over-the-counter painkillers, cold/flu "remedies" (winter) and hayfever/allergy remedies (summer).

It's really quite jarring visiting the US and watching TV there. Not only because of the seriousness of the drugs they advertise, but also the sheer volume of pharmaceutical ads. I swear it often felt like 50% of the ads were for prescription drugs. Really weird.

<comment><USER4> The U.S. spends 3 times as much per person on healthcare than the UK. Where do you think the money goes?

Of course this gives "free" TV, that you pay for through more expensive medicine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anyone feel kinda guilty working in tech? There's thousands and thousands of us trying to make the next app, putting forms on pages, making video games, shopping carts, crypto apps, etc.. We're smart enough to learn biotech and make advances, but the investment just isn't there.

You're not going to find plentiful jobs in biotech. And starting up a new company is nowhere near as easy as it is in tech. I know almost no one from school that got into it. The one person I do know is working on genomic sequencing for race horses..

I hate to say it, but it really needs steady/consistent government funding - both training students and supporting companies. We could be way further along in biotech overall if there were actually a good number of us working on it. No sane investor is going to put money into R&D that will end up failing 9/10 times. And even if you hit on something, the healthcare system is so jacked, recouping your costs are just as hard as developing the product.

<comment><USER6> 25% of people die from cancer. There's big money in finding an effective treatment.

<comment><USER4> If cancer were suddenly cured, those people would still die

What's the percentage of non-EOL people that die of cancer?

<comment><USER7> They might die in a nicer way. Dying of cancer is not very pleasant compared to falling off a horse when you're 143 and breaking your neck.

<comment><USER4> I'm assuming 75% of people aren't dying in that way (or aged 98 while making love to their fourteenth wife and losing control of the plane they're flying)

I'm personally more worried about things like dementia

<comment><USER7> Sure, I'd also rather die from cancer than from Alzheimer's, but "they'll die in a different way" is a poor argument against medical research.

<comment><USER4> But it's an argument about where to target medical research. In the UK dementia gets 6 times less funding than cancer (88m vs 540m), despite costing over twice as much to treat [0]. Global statistics seem tricky to find.

[0] [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11532982/Dement...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/news/11532982/Dementia- research-gets-13-times-less-funding-than-cancer-figures-show.html)

<comment><USER6> "Getting funding" from government sources is an entirely different game than getting funding from private sources. The former is about politics, and the latter is about making money, and what the funding is for can therefore be entirely different.

<comment><USER4> There's more money to be made from researching into baldness than curing cancer or dementia. That funding is from government and charity sources combined.

(Long term treatments of course is another thing - that's why we have expensive daily tablets for malaria, but no vaccine. More profitable to charge $1/day than charge $50 for a one-off vaccine)

Pfizer have pulled out of neuroscience research completely, Saracatinib (from AstraZeneca) was a failed cancer drug before someone thought "hey lets try this on dementia"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related to this is addiction treatment, which in the USA is unregulated. Many treatment centers don't actually follow scientifically sound methods for treatment and are little more than an expensive summer camp for adults.

John Oliver did a segment on the situation a couple of months ago, it's worth a watch: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWQiXv0sn9Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWQiXv0sn9Y)

This kind of misleading advertising for privatized healthcare sickens me. It happens for all kinds of healthcare, individual anecdotes used as advertising for a treatment with a low chance or success, or for treatments with no proof of success at all. I saw it just today in the newspaper for a depression treatment service of some sort, which tried to disguise itself as a legitimate article, and essentially tried to guilt trip the reader into thinking that the best option for their friends and family who are at risk of suicide is to send them to this treatment facility.

<comment><USER9> Given the role that social stuff plays in suicidal ideation, that's seriously disturbing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not the only shady: [https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/politics/2018/02/19/r...](https://www.argusleader.com/story/news/politics/2018/02/19/rounds- surrenders-18-500-illegal-campaign-contributions/352251002/)

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm thinking of compiling a list of conditions that modern medicine treats well, and conditions where doctors try real hard to help their patients.

For example, my neighbor wrecked his bicycle a few months ago. His doctors decided he needed a couple implants to help his leg bones grow back together optimally. I went over to look for my supposedly-delivered package this evening. He's recovering, slowly. Today he was hobbling around with a cane, and told of going to all the rehabilitation he can get (physical therapy, etc). I don't have formal medical training, but I think the rod in his leg was a reasonable intervention.

Trauma surgeons do amazing work in keeping people alive who in prior centuries rapidly expired from similar injuries.

I don't think modern medicine does well with multi-factorial conditions that develop over long periods of time.

Cancer will be a much smaller business when someone figures out how to put it in a more appropriate context, rather than treat it with the tired old war metaphor.

<comment><USER12> > Cancer will be a much smaller business when someone figures out how to put > it in a more appropriate context, rather than treat it with the tired old > war metaphor.

As a military officer who researches cancer and has lost a number of friends and family to both war and cancer, I think you may misunderstand both the way we live with and treat cancer, and what war is like. They are quite similar: all the outcomes take time off your life, there is often a significant risk to your life, there is liable to be a lot of blood at some point, and most of it is waiting to die while experts who know precious little more than you mutter and make pronouncements. (and I include myself in that definition of 'expert')

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Non-amp link: [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/cancer- tr...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/cancer-treatment- center-misleading-ads)

</comment><comment><USER14> Dead people don't give testimonies.

</comment><comment><USER15> TV-shop of medical treatments, LOL.

</comment><comment><USER16> >> "There is a special place in hell for for-profit companies who provide unrealistic or false messages to sick and vulnerable patients in an effort to cajole their business."

That may just be pessimistic, anti-social, misanthropic old me, but what incentive do people have nowadays, in a capitalist, free-market society, to care about the health of strangers when they can maximise their profits by exploiting their illness?</comment>


Could SPDY have been patented? - <AUTHOR> http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/388/the-spdy-protocol-is-not-patented-could-it-have-been-is-there-prior-art

<comment><USER2> I don't understand the last part of his question. Has Microsoft tried to patent SPDY?</comment>


The Poem That Foretold Modernism - <AUTHOR> https://newrepublic.com/article/139257/poem-foretold-modernism <comment><USER2> There's a translation of the poem here: [http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCo...](http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/French/MallarmeUnCoupdeDes.htm#anchor_Toc160699751)

</comment><comment><USER3> > torment the reader because they suggest the possibility of meaning

The first time I experienced this in art (was it Blue Velvet, Un Chien Andalou, or Ohio Impromptu?), it seemed exceedingly novel.

Unfortunately, every subsequent experience has given less and less. Surrealism, after sufficient exposure, became as dull as the most formulaic blockbuster.

Maybe I'm just not appreciating it enough. Maybe narrative and convention are arbitrary and overrated, and that principle is so profound that it has become the only thing worth discussing in art.

Perhaps...

<comment><USER4> I feel compelled to speak up on behalf of Un Chien Andalou.

You know that scene, right at the very beginning, where an unseen person strops a razor before the famous slicing with it? Four strops are given four shots, alternating angle with side of the razor. The woman's eye is your own. This film with its technique will open up the metaphorical eye of your perception of it, suggesting unknown and even unknowable things.

Now, I won't argue that Dalí or Buñuel did or didn't achieve that. My knowledge of the subject is sparse in comparison to others'. But I would say that the opening scene (by itself) qualifies as one of the most sophisticated, novel and ambitious prologues/invocations humanity has generated. I'd further posit that that knowledge should raise one's priors for suspecting dense meaning in the rest of the work, knowing nothing else.

Edit/Afterword: I'd also argue that Lynch's absurdities and nonsense are not intended to frustrate the viewer, or if so it is only true inasmuch as frustration is a signal to loosen assumptions in terms of what you are watching--to parables and dreams have a deep logic to them, in that they use symbol and association to convey felt perceptions, understandings and beliefs.

I get that the complaint is that at some point people start replicating the form without being motivated by (what one perceives as) artistic genius. But that issue, of an initially straightforward and perspicuous intent generating works of great meaning which are in time stripped of their most attractive aesthetic attributes in culture's great scrapyard, is endogenous to this society of ours. It doesn't make those aesthetic qualities bad, and it certainly doesn't need to poison the value of their source (whether it does or not is up to the beholder). Yet it is understandably easy to grow jaded in a world where aesthetic competency is almost totally uncorrelated from rational/conceptual merit.

<comment><USER3> Sure, Dali and Lynch are definitely film school's textbook answer.

> I get that the complaint is that at some point people start replicating the > form

Not really, the complaint is genuinely with the originals. Even at their best, we get what from surrealism, maybe one message? ie, the norms of artistic expression are fundamentally arbitrary?

That's just... the sort of thing I expect any 16-year old to find obvious.

So I can entertain a few possibilities:

1) Everyone finds this message, which I find obvious, to be deeply profound, to the point where they want to be bludgeoned with it over and over.

2) No one actually understands why these films are good, they're just endorsing the bizarre to look intelligent. Or parroting what film professors or critics said about them, who in turn made careers off of taking iconoclastic positions.

3) There's something deeper in these forms of art that I haven't directly experienced and no one is quite able to articulate.

4) People like what they like. (Hat tip to John Hodgman.)

I've never really found overwhelming evidence to support or disconfirm any of the alternatives, and not holding out hope I ever will, but would love to see it someday.

I genuinely would like nothing more than to hear that (3) is the right answer. I've had multiple hours-long conversations looking for support of that one.

In the absence of persuasive evidence in any direction, I should probably favor (4). It has no predictive power as a model, which sucks, but of the available options, it's the most charitable to all concerned.</comment></comment></comment>


The Beautiful, Magical World of Rajput Art - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/11/24/the-beautiful-magical-world-of-rajput-art/ <comment><USER2> If you are living in, or visiting San Francisco, then the "RAMA EPIC" Exhibition is worth checking out. It's on display at the Asian Art Museum in front of City Hall and features some of these Rajput Art paintings, as well as giant installations depicting various scenes.

More Info: [http://www.asianart.org/exhibitions/rama- epic](http://www.asianart.org/exhibitions/rama-epic)

</comment><comment><USER3> Well, Rajput art got Mughal influence well before 1739, during the reign of Akbar (1556-1605) when some Rajput kings signed peace treaties and married their daughters into Royal Mughal family. The loot of Delhi in 1739 had only a minor influence on it. In fact, the Mughal art itself is heavily influenced by Rajput artists. Shahajahan's white marble came from Makarana in Rajastan. The Mughals lost their power and wealth well before 1739, during the long struggle in Deccan (1681-1707) ending with death of Aurangzeb in 1707. He was the last powerful Mughal Emperor who commanded a large army and had wealth to sponsor big artworks (but banned them due to purist islamic beleifs).

</comment><comment><USER4> My family did a long road trip around Rajasthan back in the early 2000s -- there is gorgeous architecture and art strewn all over the landscape, completely unlike what you will find elsewhere in the world. As a brown guy raised in the West (or its embassies in other parts of the world) it was a formative experience, opening my eyes to the fantastically massive bodies of artistic achievement outside the confines of traditional western fine art.

I'd recommend a trip to the subcontinent if you ever get a chance, with the usual disclaimer: tread carefully if you're a woman. Lots of stories from my mom and sister (and more recently my wife) on that front, none of them good.

</comment><comment><USER5> For an article about art...this was sure lacking art.

<comment> happy-go-lucky I went there hoping to see some good artwork, but didn't find much.

By the way, if you're interested in Indian art, here's some great work by Raja Ravi Varma, a celebrated painter.

[http://ravivarma.org/Mythological-Characters-by-Raja-Ravi- Va...](http://ravivarma.org/Mythological-Characters-by-Raja-Ravi-Varma)

[http://ravivarma.org/People-Portraits-by-Raja-Ravi- Varma](http://ravivarma.org/People-Portraits-by-Raja-Ravi-Varma)

[http://ravivarma.org/Chromolithographs-by-Raja-Ravi- Varma](http://ravivarma.org/Chromolithographs-by-Raja-Ravi-Varma)

<comment><USER6> Ravi Varma is a peculiar example of Indian art. Basically, he employed European styles to Indian themes. Now, of course, his style has become a part of the cultural norm, with many homes worshipping his depictions of gods, without having a clue of who Ravi Varma was. Ravi Varma, as far as I know, never influenced other Indian artists.

The article, on the other hand, is about Rajput art, i.e., artists of that time and region created in that style. There are plenty of other regional styles, which may possibly help in understanding their cultures. Ravi Varma's paitings would be of little help there. That's not to say his paintings are good works of art. They are. But I think people have very different motivations for seeking ethnic art and mainstream art.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was in Rajasthan a few months back. One of my favorite forms of art now! Some photos of (more architectural in nature) Rajput art in here. [http://www.kylehotchkiss.com/photography/india-2016/](http://www.kylehotchkiss.com/photography/india-2016/)</comment>


Finishing - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/05/finishing.html

<comment><USER2> Finishing is also important for deciding not to finish.

When you believe that you can finish, and you have difficult past experiences to prove it (to yourself most of all) you can more easily walk away from anything that is not worth finishing, without doubting your motivations for doing so.

<comment><USER3> Good point. I think the same is true for a lot of things that you do in college. For example, in college, they force you to keep deadlines. If you can do that, consistently, for four years, then later in life, you can occasionally miss a deadline and know that it was for a good reason, and not because you're a slacker and procrastinator.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've went for 2 years to math uni, then for another two to physics uni, then to music academy for, again, 2 years.

So, technically, I haven't _finished_ any of those, but what I got from each - a solid advanced introduction to the field - is what I really wanted, all in goal of making me a good game maker and a well-rounded person. So, I consider them finished. With pretty good GPA to boot.

Only reason I didn't go to art academy too for 2 years is that I already considered myself proficient in the field.

Point is, you cannot finish if you don't know what your goal is.

</comment><comment><USER5> Finishing is great and there's definitely a sense of accomplishment. Starting is usually fun ... it has a sense of adventure and a certain newness.

So if starting and finishing represent 5% each, that leaves 90% in the middle that's nothing more than discipline and an overwhelming sense of vision. Discipline is what I have to cultivate in myself - fortunately I recognize both what that is and what it means. And it's discipline in the middle that allows you to finish.

In any case, congrats to Jessica and the rest of this spring's graduating class.

</comment><comment><USER6> If you decide to make the financial investment to start college, it makes sense to finish. That does not mean it necessarily makes sense to start in the first place.

<comment><USER7> That investment is a sunk cost. It definitely may make sense to finish, but throwing more money after your initial sunk cost shouldn't be why.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I finished university, I felt ashamed of having stayed so long. There was no sense of pride, no sense of accomplishment. The predominant - positive - feeling was relief. University was a hoop-jumping exercise, and beyond that it meant nothing to me. An hour after my last exam, I stuck my laptop and the few things I wanted to keep in the back of my car, chucked the rest of my stuff into the bin outside the flat, and drove the 15 hours back home. In the end I got my degree mailed to me rather than bothering to go to graduation. There's a masters degree sitting in a plastic folder in the back of my cupboard somewhere, it's been out of the envelope twice since I got it.

Maybe it's different for others, but for me I only ever get a sense of accomplishment if I honestly value the thing I'm doing.

If you're doing something that you want, or that gives you a sense of satisfaction that's going to be sufficient to justify suffering through it, then rock on. It sounds like the blogger's daughter had a good time, all power to her. But one of the big things that life's taught me is to recognise that people are different (no, really!) and that other people telling you that doing something hard will give you a sense of accomplishment? It's not necessarily _true._ I stayed at uni because that's the story my parents sold me as a girl, that when you start something you carry it through. But that's not always good advice. When you're doing something that's just going to suck the soul out of you often the best advice is to see if there's a way to stop doing it before it costs you something that's going to take a long time to recover from - if you do at all.

One sense of finishing something, and not necessarily any less valid than the first, is to recognise a bad gamble and say 'It's finished here because I'm finishing it. My life, not yours.'

I just wish I'd known that when I was 16 and was making my decisions in this regard. So, if you are at that age and making your decisions in this sort of regard, it might be worth taking an honest look at whether this is actually something that will make you happy or just something that people are saying will make you happy because it's hard. And, if it is the latter, seeing whether doing other things that people tell you are hard that you don't necessarily want to do makes you happy - and whether it makes you four years and thousands of hours of work worth of happy.

<comment><USER9> I recognise myself in your story. I took off with a backpack before the ink had dried on my last exam paper. I look back on those years now, 15 years later, and wish I'd had the courage to walk off earlier. In retrospect, it's obvious to me that everything I learned at university I learned in year 1. The remaining years were simply "finishing what I started" because a "degree is good to have."

We're all different, and we all get different things from formal education. If it's not for you, do your future self a favour and don't waste the time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I graduated from the same school a year ago. It took 10 years, because I got very sick in the middle. I did so because I wanted to finish what I started.</comment>


Will your cloudservices give in to political bullying? - <AUTHOR> http://pastebin.com/aqhsmyjf

<comment><USER3> The idea behind github is to encourage new ways of thinking and different approaches -- including ones that question conventional thought. Parodying the excesses of feminism via github helps to reveal to women and men alike just what precisely the gender divide is made up from. Leaving the github up serves the useful purpose of inviting and CHALLENGING women to increase their interactions with men working in IT and show that real women are unlike the exaggerated-caricatures that feminism (or at least 'extremist feminism') has caused them to become perceived.

<comment><USER4> I don't need to be CHALLENGED to increase my interactions with men in IT. Because IT is filled with men, I interact with them constantly. Perhaps a useful github would instead attempt to CHALLENGE the men in IT to interact with real women, instead of building up imaginary caricatures and basing complex worldviews on this without validating it. Sounds kind of waterfall, really, to build up so much theory before ever trying a real interaction.

<comment><USER3> It sounds as though you do need to be challenged. These caricatures did not spring from nothing; there are reasons for them being used. Might they be bad reasons? Probably, but not definitely. Go deeper and interact more deeply with those men in IT with whom you claim to work alongside. What you find might surprise you and also give you a chance to bring about changes for the betterment of women, men, and IT workers generally.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're too cheap to host your own information repository, you have to play by the rules of the people who do. What you want to do is publish your work to censorship resistant Internet tools like Freenet, Tor, i2p or Gnutella.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. But these cloud services are so new, that people are not aware of the risks they are taking. They don't realize the needs they actually have. Since the customers don't know their needs, neither do the service providers. But if you want to stay ahead of the curve, I think you should as a consumer, request reliable service providers, or self host. As a service provider you should provide reliable services. At least, that is where I think we are heading.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why are so many of the accounts commenting on this post (and the dead one) brand brand new? Are you existing users too embarrassed to make your points under a 'real' name, or brand new 'extremists' roaming the internet to find a place to argue the topic?

<comment><USER6> They are from 4chan. [http://boards.4chan.org/g/res/38723234](http://boards.4chan.org/g/res/38723234)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> While a satirical repo doesn't necessarily belong on GitHub, I think the general trend of large internet companies to pull material that is considered offensive, usually by progressives, is worrying.

In fact, if GitHub were an American shopping mall, they would not be allowed to stop people from wearing T-shirts that mocked feminism, because of they way the first amendment is interpreted.

I don't think GitHub should remove material just because it differs from their political viewpoint, or from the viewpoint of people who are able to cause the most trouble for them. Of course people are always free to criticize the repo and its authors if they don't like it.

<comment><USER8> That is a much bigger issue than the specific content of the repo. While it may not be "valuable" from a code quality and usefulness point of view, the C+= repo was a modestly clever satire.

Is that Github's business to host political/comedic content? Not exactly - they do _code_ hosting. On the other hand, code is just text files and they can host any form of data.

Is it their business to police content? That depends on jurisdiction - <USER2> example, in the USA, much depends on obscenity or hate crime laws. In Germany, if something were deemed to be Nazi propaganda, it would be illegal.

Obviously, none of this applied here - instead, the internet 'progressive' outrage machine created a PR nuisance for GitHub that needed to be addressed somehow. It creates an unfortunate precedent, and points to the trouble that a person or group can have when they don't control their own content and servers.

<comment><USER7> You put it very well, and I agree with everything you wrote. The only point I was trying to make that was different than what you have said, is that if GitHub had _consistently_ removed all satirical repos, then it wouldn't be a problem.

Sites are free to set there only rules, but sites like github can also be considered as a public space, and so I think these sites have a moral obligation to make these rules objective and not politically biased. What is troubling is that, whether the rules explicitly say so or not, they tend to censor non-pc material. I'm sure progressives would have no problem seeing the issue if the censorship was the other way around.

<comment><USER8> I agree with your point as well.

The problem seems to be "squeaky wheel gets the grease". A blog/twitter outrage mob launches lots of reports to GH for "offensive content", which is a nuisance for them. After all, _hosting_ is their business, not policing content.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Does your team plan work in sprints/cycles? - <AUTHOR> If so, what's the primary value you derive from them?
If not, why not?
I've worked in companies where sprints worked fine and others where they became a source of frustration (largely I think due to overly ambitious sprint planning).
Disclosure - I'm one of the founders of a company making a new issue tracker [0] and how best to support teams that work in sprints/cycles is something we care quite a lot about
0: https://Kitemaker.co <comment><USER2> My current employer promotes scrum/agile, so we have sprints with company-wide sprint reviews.

We don't get much value from them because there is little sprint planning, and 2 days before the review there is a push to figure out what is "done" to present.

I have worked on other teams that embraced the planning aspect better and it was a source of reassurance that everyone was on the same page.

The primary value (when I was on a team that did it "right") was the common context that was shared by all and represented in the kanban (literally, sticky notes on the wall and some masking tape). There was transparency and traceability. I'm not sure it made us more "efficiency" or "productive", but i removed a lot of frustration of being in the dark about what the team is doing.

<comment><AUTHOR> > There was transparency and traceability

That makes a lot of sense. Do you think you could have achieved the same thing with regular sync ups or prioritization meetings or discussions without worrying too much about what you'd get done the next X weeks?

<comment><USER2> I think it's possible, as long as there is a central place with all this information.

> without worrying too much about what you'd get done the next X weeks

We didn't worry too much about metrics or progress. We just had everything going on in sticky notes on the wall. You could walk in, look at the wall and get an idea of what's going on outside of what you are working on.

Personally, I like whiteboards and sticky notes(gives you an excuse to get up and move around). But it can be jira, trac, a wiki, a textfile in the repo.

I like knowing what's going on around me and how things fit together. Others like working in isolation and following requirements. In my experience, understanding the origin of requirements and the context is important to the dev process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't even remember when I last worked in a non sprints/cycles way (the year started with 201x or even 200x).

But sprints does not necessarily equals cycles, and cycles does not necessarily equals Scrum or Agile.

I totally agree with you stand that "overly ambitious sprint planning" is the root of all evil, many teams forget that planning is not a construction plan but more of a show of intents and you can see the stress level fluctuating between the start and end of sprints.

Another big problem is task estimation, we know that we are bad at it but the "process" forces us to estimate anyway. This in turn leads to more of the above mentioned stress since we usually under estimate.

I found that many times usually Kanban, or ScrumBan works quite well and mitigate some of the mentioned problems.

</comment><comment><USER4> We use sprints.

It's frustrating due to overambitious programs and management 'metricizing' it.</comment>


Comedian Tom Green hurls audience at TomGreen to get Twitter handle - oscar-the-horse https://plus.google.com/109732816282804649211/posts/9PA94owAxhh

<comment><AUTHOR> The title is completely false.

If you listen to the actual broadcast, Opie and Anthony asked Tom Green why he didn't have @TomGreen, and Tom Green explained that another Tom Green had it. He even said that he didn't want to start anything because the last time he brought it up over a year ago, the other Tom Green turned it into a big stink. He said a couple of times that he didn't want to start anything.

It was Opie and Anthony and their audience that took this as a prank and ran with it. Opie and Anthony were the ones that stoked this, not Tom Green.

</comment><comment><USER2> I can't stand cyber-bullying because for the most part there's no risk involved and it's so easy to leverage any scenario. It's easy to fight someone anonymously. Anytime I think of cyber bullying the video comes to mind where the scrawny little kid is poking the bigger kid at school and then he proceeds to pick him up and slam him on the ground. I hate to say it, but 4chan may be on this guys side. They usually stick up for the underdog.

</comment><comment><USER3> people still listen to/care about Tom Green? Shocking indeed!

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't condone bullying, and to each their own... but why don't you just ask him for a bucket of cash and be done with it?

<comment><USER5> Selling twitter handles is against their tos. Even proposing it would probably cause twitter to confiscate the name.

<comment><USER4> Fair enough, but I'm sure at some point Twitter facilitates names from squatters, no? Or at least handles a transaction like that? Do they just require no money changes hands?</comment></comment></comment>